Tomorrow's battery medium

It all depends on what point one wants to make. You already mentioned one way of skewing the numbers: Do they compare with burning coal, oil or gas? But there are more. What energies did they compare? Just bare chemical reactions or also the conversion into some useful work? Did they figure in the thermodynamic efficiency? For both? Did they figure in waste heat recovery? For both? There is plenty of room for 'creative accounting' here.

Jeroen Belleman

On a sunny day (Thu, 18 Oct 2018 09:42:51 +0200) it happened Jeroen Belleman wrote in :

Tata is a big iron ore melter, in Ijmuiden Netherlands steel production. Those ovens take a lot of power, maybe they have their own power plant, some factories here have that, I once visited one that had that. They likely want to decrease CO2 costs. But it is just announced, so I have no details.

The H2 then should power the H2 cars....

What they do with the O? Fire their ovens?

Sure.

Waterstof is hydrogen in Dutch... that's fun.

George H.

Can they use it instead of carbon for steel smelting? I know that it can be used for steel cutting

It's essential to 'coke' coal to remove the hydrocarbons before using it in a blast furnace/reactor. Hydrogen content has to be low, or embrittlement results, in welding. So, direct hydrogen use in steelmaking is unlikely to be chemically workable.

afaict there are two cases. hydrogen generated as a biproduct from "coke oven gas"

and there are companies working on replacing coke entirely with hydrogen to enable fossil fuel free steel making when you have cheap electricity

Jan Panteltje only gave us what he found interesting - hydrogen is easier to burn in a gas turbine that coal dust, which might explain the high claim.

Probably not - that's tricky.

The Dutch do go in for using the exhaust heat from power stations for "district heating" but only in the centre of bigger cities.

Nijmegen - where I lived from 1993 to 2013 - has a population of 175,000 and only now is getting district heating for 14,000 houses.

But why would anybody bother?

Not really. It's just the direct translation from the Latin hydro- (water) gen (maker). German is Wasserstoff (also with the double f).

English scientists liked to show off their Latin. The Dutch and Germans were equally fluent in Latin, but when they did write in the native languages they did want to be comprehended.

Spinoza was a philosopher (and lens grinder), rather than a scientist, and never put much effort into making his output easily comprehensible (not that this stopped it from being hugely influential, despite the best efforts of the conservative world).

There wouldn't be any trouble with the chemistry. An excess of hydrogen in the steel produced could be a problem

but blasting some oxygen through the molten steel ( as in the Bessemer process, if not for the same reason) should get it down to acceptable levels.

Purging the molten steel with an inert gas (like argon) would probably work too (if not as fast).

In Dutch it is 'waterstof' single 'f'.

Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote

There are huge windmill fields, and more planned, in the North Sea, and Tata here is located right next to the North Sea, port of Ijmuiden, so that could work.

It's from Greek, rather than Latin.

"Vannstoff" is an older Norwegian name for hydrogen, though it has been known here as "Hydrogen" for a long time. (It is still common to see "surstoff" - "Sour stuff" for oxygen, again as a direct translation of the Greek "Oxygen".)

David Brown

Oxygen is 'zuurstof' in Dutch, 'zuur' is your 'Sour'. And 'sugar' is 'suiker'. :-) Many languages are related.

English split off from Dutch and German around 800AD.

Jonathon Israel puts the split between Dutch and German rather later - arou nd 1500 when theologians like Luther and his numerous Dutch counterparts ne eded subordinate clauses to split their theological hairs and chose to set them up rather differently.

At the time Dutch was the dominant low German dialect, and Dutch publishers sold their books throughout Scandinavia and Germany.

High German - as a distinct dialect - seems to have come in with Fredrick G reat from about 1740. Fredrick and his court preferred French, but when the y did speak German it had to be their High German, rather than anything lik e Dutch which they preferred to see as one more Low German dialect.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

He perhaps only claims to have a bit of IQ.

It matters not. The application of one's knowledge is what matters. All he has applied in the last twenty years is the palm of his hand reaching into the fly of his pants. And then the idiot feels compelled to post here.

I'm not so confident: H2O isn't present in normal blast furnace chemistry, and it IS going to be part of the chemistry if you burn hydrogen. The 'killing' process for gas removal is common only in small-batch alloy steels. Flame chemistry in blast furnaces is a complex technology (that I admire, but do not comprehend).

The SSAB steel project has a few years to tinker, the plan will be a decade old before their 'demonstration' of the result is expected. Maybe two decades.

The past 20 years goes back to 1998. I was still working out a ECL-based pu lse timing scheme for an electron-spin resonance spectrometer back then, th ough that was the year that the customer realised that he wasn't going to g et any more graduate students to use it, and the project got killed.

Pity - the project had let me recycle a bunch of sub-nanosecond timing circ uits that I'd originally worked out for Gigabit Logics GaAs parts in Motoro la's ECLinPS (which wasn't quite a fast, but did stay in production).

From 2000 to 2003 I was working for Haffmans BV in Venlo on measuring gear for the brewing industry - Haffmans supplies about 65% of the world market.

Rather different electronics, but interesting.

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in the steel produced could be a problem

, and it IS going to be part of the chemistry if you burn hydrogen.

But why would it be a problem? Water is a gas at blast furnace temperatures , and getting rid of gas is what blast furnaces are about.

y steels. Flame chemistry in blast furnaces is a complex technology (that I admire, but do not comprehend).

So you've got lots to be anxious about, and no way of finding out which of your anxieties needs to be taken seriously.

de old before their 'demonstration' of the result is expected. Maybe two decades.

That's industrial development for you. My father got an international paten t on the continuous counter-current cooking of paper pulp, on a Kamyr conti nuous digester (the sixth that Kamyr had ever sold).

had been working on his own scheme for some ten years at the time, and hadn 't been able to get it to work. Kamyr - as a company - were mightily peeved to have beaten to the draw, but Johan Richter (who did know my father) was mightily impressed. The crucial innovation that allowed my father's scheme to work was ostensibly minor (and wasn't actually covered in the patent, s o Kamyr filched immediately) but Kamyr hadn't managed to come up with it.

Correct. An oxygen bubbler won't remove hydroxyl ion, will it? And, it's not just iron, but all the chemical interaction with the slag that will be, inevitably, different. I recall tales of a contaminant problem with hydroxyl radical in alpha-quartz (man-made) crystals, held up production for years.